» Poetry

Act Now + more

Act Now

When I’m low, I hang out

with the slugs and sugar ants,

I ignore the emails, You will run out

of storage in the cloud.

The clouds

will always make space for me,
I already live in a fog

and there’s always room for more

photos, a virtual bookcase.

As much as I love

being able to type my sadness

to a stranger, my screen sometimes

reaches out and puts its hands

on my hips—stay here a little longer.

I know I’m brave

when I leave my earbuds on the table

next to my cat. And when my stomach

knots, it’s because I’ve hit reply all

and now Dick knows he’s living

out his name like a job description.

This is when I know

I need to stand up and stop

being another head without body, a mind

plus fingers typing. Sometimes

when I’m walking down the street

a neighbor runs up to me to tell me

how Crossfit is working for her,

I press Skip ad until I see the real-time video

of Max, the dog who lives three doors down

and is dealing with depression

because his owner just died.

This is when I reach down

and wipe the goo from Max’s eyes,

and realize how much happier I am

when I sit in the middle of empty road

under an unlimited sky

holding a dog who has no idea

why his owner isn’t coming home.

If We Had Better Lighting, Our World Would be a Soap Opera

Global warming is more than me leaving

the heat on 80 degrees in the guest room.

There’s a shadow on our planet’s lung

and the narrow road is what we drive now

because half of it has slid into the ocean.

We are living longer, but we’re doing it with less

sex and friends. The view from here is gorgeous,

but who to share it with? I am watching the world

turn, all my children becomes all my adults.

I try to count our steps to the grave—5, 100,

1000? More? I’m less than optimistic.

I’m the character who is drinking wine

at noon in her nightgown. The soap operas

are failed decisions and mistakes are real life

choices. Global warming makes my cheeks

flush. Climate change is another way

to introduce myself, to undress and dive

into the ocean that wants to swallow me.
Let me cry dramatically before the scene ends,

let the director drag me to the shore.

Sunflower, What Have You Gotten Yourself Into1

Tonight a neighbor told me how climate change

was a hoax as we stood under an orange sky

from the smoke of wildfires and when he coughed

because the air quality was not good enough

for his lungs I said, It hasn’t rained for years

and when the birds started falling from the sky

he said, That happens sometimes, it’s cyclical.

God bless the confused, I said to the waves

reaching over into our yards, to the oceans

so warm the icebergs are the ice cubes

the barista places into our lattes, this should

cool it. And at night when I walk home

in a tank top because what was once a winter

is a mild spring, I lean back and watch the bats

circle and eat up whatever insects we have

too many of and I think my god, we fucked this up

so quickly, as I admire the moon that almost winks

at me, as if it knows how many years we have left.  

 1Title from a line by Kim Rashidi.